Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser Page A

time—when we were lying on the edge of the wood, covering the open ground beyond, I heard him asking for a field dressing—but which platoon he belonged to I never knew. When we opened fire at Japs moving on the open ground, the men on either side of me were strangers; one of them kept seeing Japs in the trees beyond the open space, and blazed away, cursing, but I believe it was wishful thinking.
    Then we were withdrawing. Behind us the company were leaving the wood by the way we'd come in, and when we on the far side were ordered to fall back we went quite slowly, with the little sergeant shouting hoarsely to take our time. He knew his business, that one, for as we retreated past the cleared bunkers to the front of the wood he kept up an incessant patter of orders and encouragement (I have an idea he was a Welshman) keeping us in a rough line, well spaced out, firing as we went, for Japs were filtering into thetrees we had just left. He was next to me, firing short bursts; I had a shot at one running figure among the trees, and he went down, but I think it was a dive for cover.
    There was a film called
Honky Tonk
, in which Clark Gable had to back out of a saloon, covering the occupants with his gun and remarking: “This reminds me of the days when we used to do all our walking backwards.” The words came back to me in the temple wood, as such things will, and at some point the man on my left dropped to his knees shouting: “Look what I've got!” I didn't identify the object, but what he did get a second later was a bullet in the leg from an unseen Jap, and he rolled over shouting: “They got me! The dirty rats, they got me!” It wasn't a bad wound, a furrow just above the knee, and he hobbled out of the wood under his own steam, blaspheming painfully.
    That was the battle in the temple wood, an insignificant moment in the war; its importance is personal. It was typical of the kind of action that was going on all around Meiktila, and if figures mean anything, we won it, although I am still puzzled about its conclusion. Japs were re-entering the wood as we left it, but they cannot have reoccupied it, for the battalion history's tally of Japanese killed is exact, not an estimate, and must have been made on the ground afterwards, with ourselves in possession. So I conclude that the withdrawal in which I took part was not the end of the action, as I thought at the time.
    This is the trouble with eye-witness: it sees only partof the whole, and is incomplete. If mine is patchy, I can only excuse it on the ground that I had never been in a fight to the death before, with the enemy at close quarters, which is, to say the least, confusing. I have tried to describe in plain terms what I saw, and can be sure of; what I thought at the time is less clear, but some strong impressions remain.
    At the moment of fixing bayonets I had that hollow feeling which most writers locate in the stomach but in my case manifests itself in the throat; after we were fired on I didn't notice it. To say I was shocked at seeing Parker and Steele hit is correct in the sense that one is shocked by running into a brick wall; astonishment and fascination came into it, too. You read of such things, now you see the reality, and think: “So
that
's what it looks like!” The thought of being hit myself occurred only in the moment before I started crawling towards the Bren, to be submerged in relief when Stanley took possession. Going into the wood I was scared stiff but not witless; given Aladdin's lamp I would have been in Bermuda. No, that's not true; if it were, I'd have kept out of the Army in the first place. Being there, with the choice made, you go ahead—and if anyone says you could always change your mind, and run away, he's wrong; you can't. It sounds pompous to say it's a matter of honour, but that's what it comes down to, and Falstaff knew it. He was quite right, though, that honour hath no skill in surgery—which is why you are perfectly